There seems to be a lot of concern recently that

A) Advertising is in crisis, and
B) That nerds, MBAs, bean-counters, data, numbers and/or strategists are to blame

While I agree there is reason to worry, I’m quite certain the underlying problem has nothing to do with nerds, or MBA’s, strategists or…numbers. Rather I believe the core problem is rooted in a culture of complacency within the creative leadership of agencies themselves.

I can’t talk about creative leadership without thinking about Bill Bernbach. It’s sadly ironic to me that many of the creative directors who came to advertising largely because of the thinking that came out of the creative revolution are the very same who now seem to not be able to see the forest for the trees in this new era. It seems important to remember now that in the 1960′s and 70′s, T.V. wasn’t just a new technology for entertainment and advertising, it fundamentally changed society. Bernbach realized this, and saw that ideas and methodologies that had worked for so long in advertising were no longer relevant. I think the same thing is happening now, though possibly in an even more profound way. The fact of the matter is, the web and network connected devices are new technology, but they have also changed society in deep and permanent ways. Ideas and methodologies that used to work, simply don’t anymore, and any hope of remaining relevant will require a revolutionary new way of looking at things.

While it’s easy to point the finger at the new comers for the lack of big thinking, it’s been my experience that most agencies and most CD’s are so singularly focused on one notion of what “big thinking” can look like they’ve painted themselves into a corner and have yet to produce a single piece of socially important work online. As I did months ago, I have to repeat Andrew Keller’s question “Why didn’t Kodak’s agency come up with Flickr?” I could add “Why didn’t Coors’ agency come up with Foursquare?” Why have agencies relegated themselves to reacting to the creative, paradigm shifting thinking of others instead of producing it themselves? Over the last 15 years, brands have looked to agencies and their creative firepower to keep them relevant, and with frighteningly few exceptions, they’ve uniformly failed.

In his AdAge article, Tom Hinkes laments “Marketing departments used to be the creative engines powering successful corporations.” His solution to get back to this is for us to “Use the Force”

I’m not comfortable leaving the future of this industry to something George Lucas made up.

Instead, I submit that the solution is for us to actually be the “creative engines” again. To push ourselves to ask bigger questions than the next campaign, the next slogan, the next commercial, the next micro-site. We should be pushing ourselves to not just fill the medium, but to define it. To do this, will require more than just one point of view. Yes, great CD’s, AD’s and copywriters remain critical, but the problems are too complex for just this team. Instead, by bringing in “nerds” and by leveraging, rather than fighting data, we can tell the stories of the success of our work in terms “bean-counters” can care about. Instead of saying “trust us”, we have the opportunity now to actually prove the value of our work on a number of different levels. But more importantly, by broadening our definition of “creative” and by bringing strong analytical, customer research, strategic and business minds to the table at the very beginning of projects, and doing so not simply in support of the “creative team”, our work can actually become important again.

Ultimately, if we’re going to survive, it will be critical that we bring to bear the one thing that still differentiates great agencies: the ability to organize many people of different skill sets around one vision. The fact is this: the current system isn’t working and the reality is that the march of technology is make things more complex, not less. So while big thinking is critical, it’s just as critical to come to terms with the fact the big thinking doesn’t lie solely in the hands of “creatives.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement from Philosophical Investigations is a sort of heartbreaking realization for anyone who has ever bargained with their pets, as I have, offering all sorts of rewards if only they would admit that they can speak. At it’s core though, this idea also rings fundamentally true to me, separating the concept of hearing from understanding and asking if we can ever really understand something without the empathy that comes from similarity.

A few years ago I was listening to Andrew Keller give a presentation about CPB and at one point he asked the audience, maybe rhetorically,

“Why didn’t Kodak’s agency come up with Flickr? How much more relevant might Kodak have been in digital photography if they had come up with Flickr?”

The question has stuck with me since, serving as a sort of a personal challenge. Over time, I’ve posed this question to a number other people, and although almost universally their response has been that it wasn’t possible, rarely could anyone articulate exactly why. This just added to the challenge for me. Why not? What was so fundamentally or structurally different about Flickr from any other run of the mill marketing site that made people so certain that it was impossible for some agency, somewhere, to create it?

What I’ve come to believe is that it has nothing to do with the idea itself but rather it’s that, from the perspective of the advertising world, the web is Wittgenstien’s lion. There are instances where agencies hear the web talking and they recognize the words it’s saying but, in the end, the web, the people who create for it, and the social dynamics that drive it are that lion. There is no understanding because there is empathy because there is no similarity.

It was dysfunctional from the start, going back to the very beginning of the relationship between agencies and the web both as a concept and a practice. For the most part agencies didn’t get into the web because they had any great love for the medium, but rather because there was money to be made by adding another channel to the mix. Viewed as addition to the creative arc that existed, the history and the nature of the web was never really a consideration and as time has gone on, the web and agencies have drifted further apart.

Part of this drift I believe is rooted in the structure of mediums that make up advertising. A key element of what makes agencies work is being able to reduce a medium down to a set of finite, permanent truths and techniques and then codifying them. The existence of these fixed rules and the mastery of them is what allows an agency to focus on concept and execution rather than having to spend their time constantly reexamining the core fundamentals of the of any given medium. The web on the other hand, seems to defy consistent explanation. If I describe the web as a system of hyperlinked documents, thats technically true, but it fails to explain the underlying power or social importance we know the web has. Even trying to explain the technically simple Twitter to someone who’s never used it can prove perplexing. What use does anyone have for broadcasting 140 characters worth of content? But further, listening to people explain Twitter more often turns into an explanation of that person’s experience with it. For some it’s a CRM tool, for others it’s quasi instant messaging, for others its a news stream, for many it’s a combination of all of these and more. For Maureen Dowd it’s the end of civilization. Most often, what I hear is: “you just need to try it to understand it.”

To see this in action, you don’t have to look much further than the Modernista! “site” or the Skittles attempt at the same thing. In both cases the “words” of the web are all there: Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Google; but what’s not clear is whether there is any understanding. Certainly Modernista! understands the mechanics of each of these, they get the function. But why did Modernista! put portfolio on Flickr for example? Is it to have a conversation about the work? As far as I have found, no conversation exists. What does Skittles want me to know about them from a tweet stream? That people eat their candy? In both cases, the goal seems more to demonstrate their mastery of the toolset than to engage in any meaningful way with the web as a social construct. Moderista! is a useful example, but they represent the rule when it comes to agencies and the web. Take the new site for Booneoakley. Lauded by the ad world as “embracing social media”, it is, in my view, a commercial. Yes, the videos are on YouTube, but thats the end of it. Again, it’s reducing the web down to a set of tools on to which one sets graphic design.

But in my mind, and even bigger part of this drift is based in the motivations and definitions of success within agencies. Advertising is, as a culture, about a single great event. It’s about the rush of make or break moments and the success of individuals. Its entire structure both physically and culturally has evolved to support this, from the make up of project teams, to the relationships with clients, to the award shows. The precognitive creative director, the image of the art director and the copy writer sitting around late into the night until the perfect idea is hatched, the pressure of the pitch, the reveal of the single amazing idea; these moments are mythic and they have been repeated season after season, year after year for decades. But this high risk/high payoff endeavor also requires fixed targets and the ability to master techniques. It becomes almost impossibly difficult to justify investing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, the reputation of the agency and ultimately the client’s brand on a concept whose technological or social underpinnings may be irrelevant before the concept is even executed. This is why T.V. is to advertising what the web never has or could be: For 60 years the fundamental nature of the medium has remained fixed, allowing people and agencies to become masters of its manipulation rather than having to re-learn the fundamentals every 6 weeks. The ownership of the medium extended past the creative execution to ad buying and even to defining the measurements of success. It’s this history that drives articles targeting agencies with titles like “10 tactics for success in social media”, “How to measure ROI on the web” or “Whats the Next Hot Thing Online?” It’s the need for solid and stable jumping off point, the need to have mastered the fundamental framework and have it reduced to simple, repeatable process.

For the most part, none of this really exists with web projects. This is evident in the content of those articles and the fact that article by article, week by week, it would seem the rules and advice constantly change. And of course, they do. The web is, by the most generous estimate maybe 15 years old, still in its primordial state, undulating, cracking and rebuilding. This might offer some hope that as it matures as a medium, it may gain the stability of something like T.V., but I think this is unlikely. Practically speaking, without something like the FCC, there is simply no organizing force to create stabilization. But more importantly I think it’s unlikely because, going back to the attempts at defining Twitter, the first task in stabilizing something is to define it, and rather than moving towards definition, the web is racing faster and faster away from it. As connectivity become more ubiquitous, the web as a concept is actually broadening so far it’s now beginning to consume other mediums. Take Hulu, for example. What part of that is the web and what part is T.V.? Or XBox’s platform for networked gaming, which currently also allows for the streaming of movies, and will soon include the ability to browse movies as well as integration into Facebook and Twitter. Or, consider for a moment that as this connectivity shrinks the distance between us it will also force us to acknowledge that for most of the world, the interface of the web isn’t through a laptop, but through a cellphone. And finally, we must reconcile the fact that they very notion of “laptop”, “cellphone” and “T.V.” are changing right in front of us.

Going back to our initial question, it’s easy then to understand why Flickr didn’t come out of an agency. Rather than the single big idea or the snappy slogan, Flickr is the result of a constant collaboration with members. Rather than a fixed structure, Flickr is a reaction to the ever changing technical and cultural landscape of the web that surrounds it. Rather than the vision of a single Creative Director or copywriter, Flickr represents the work of user experience designers, interface designers, analytics experts and developers of all stripes. Rather than seasonal campaign, Flickr is the result of years of consistent development and refinement. It lacks nearly every characteristic that would be recognizable to an agency. But, how valuable would have it been to Kodak? How might it have changed their relationship with their customers? If value on the web is about the experience, what’s the value to a brand to own an experience like Flickr? If attention is the only scarce commodity online, what is that attention worth?

There will probably always be a need for advertising. The sheer ubiquity of the web though will require brands to rethink their value to their customers and reconcile their place online. If the agencies of today want a part of brands finding that place, and I would argue if they want to continue to stay in business, there will have to be more than an evolution, there will have to be a revolution. Agencies will not only have to reinvent the way they see themselves, but the way they see the world, the way they relate to their client and to dramatically broaden their understanding of why they exist at all. Our notion of hierarchy will have to change. Our concept of how a project lives and grows will have to change. Even our idea of what a project is or can be will change. The web breaks down so many of the structures weve built, and the same flattened landscape that our clients will have to deal with faces us as well, a failure to come to terms with this will ultimatly threaten the existance of what we call an agency. It’s a lion speaking to us, and our survival depends on not just hearing it, but finding some way to understand it.